Roald Dahl created a bevy of classic children’s books in his lifetime. Many of these works have been adapted, some more than once, as is the case with The Witches. What makes Dahl’s stories stand out in the pantheon of children’s stories is that he presents fantastical worlds with an edge to them. While in some, the threat is to secondary characters and hidden beneath the veneer of wonder (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), in The Witches, the danger is bubbling on the surface from the beginning. This is especially true in the 2020 adaptation.
The 1990 adaptation is a classic, and it is probably one of Anjelica Huston’s top 5 scene-stealing, scenery-chewing, character roles, so why would anyone remake it? Why would Anne Hathaway put herself out there to get compared to that master turn performance? Why would Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, Guillermo del Toro, Octavia Spencer, and Alfonso Cuarón all attach their names to the project? While we’ll never know what was in their hearts, and the jaded will say they did it for money, perhaps it had to do with the love of the source material, the opportunity to enhance the visual effects, and diversify the representation on screen so that more kids can see themselves reflected as the hero.
Anne Hathaway fully committed to her role as the Grand High Witch, and the accent that went along with it, ill-advised as the accent may have been. The film never tries to hide that she’s a witch from the audience, so she never has to reign in anything. They utilized what appeared to be a mix of visual and special effects to help her achieve her witch transformation. While sometimes it felt like it captured the spirit of Quentin Blake’s illustrations from the book, other times the lean into visual effects over practical SFX makeup was too apparent. I found the stuff with the hands stretching and bending in weird ways very unsettling, but I also wondered how those moments would’ve landed in a theatre full of kids. It was filmed in a way that was meant to draw a group reaction, but it never got a chance to have one.
This adaptation, despite a location change, is more faithful to the novel than the 1990 version. That is unfortunate for Jahzir Bruno, who plays our unnamed lead, simply credited as “Hero Boy,” because once he turns into a mouse, we never see that young actor again, only hear his voice. He had a great presence on camera, even though he spent much of that time selling his performance without words.
Though this adaptation was more faithful, one of the ways it was not was with the Daisy/Mary (voiced by Kristin Chenoweth). Daisy is Hero Boy’s pet mouse who we learn is a girl named Mary who got turned into a mouse. She doesn’t reveal her true identity, or that she can speak, until Hero Boy and another kid, Bruno, are turned into mice. In the book, Hero Boy had two pet mice (William and Mary), but neither of them was previously humans. I have long been a fan of Kristin Chenoweth, and maybe it’s just because I recognized her voice, but I knew it was an adult in the role of Daisy/Mary. I wish they had cast a young female actor in the role, especially as she’s voicing opposite two age-appropriate male actors.
They gave The Grandmother (played by Octavia Spencer) a backstory where, as a child, she saw her friend take candy from a stranger (AKA the Grand High Witch) and turn into a chicken the next day. In the book, I know the grandmother was a retired witch hunter and had gotten into it after a run-in with witches as a child, but I don’t think there was a story of her friend turning into a chicken. This seemed like a misstep to me to have her witness a previous spell of this nature because why would the witch’s earlier spell render the child mute and the newer spell allow for speech? Seems like bad advancement in magic over time.
There is often a prominence of food in his work, going so far to be in the titles of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, and The Witches is no exception. Food plays an important role; the witches use candy to turn kids into animals, and pea soup plays a pivotal role leading up to the climax. However, it was the first meal that The Grandmother made for Hero Boy that stood out to me, a big plate of chicken wings. At the time, it was just because they looked good, but then they revealed that her friend got turned into a chicken. This changed the chicken wings for me; how could she still eat chickens knowing they could have once been children?
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